All Systems Geaux

BATON ROUGE, La. —  No other group of face-painted, shirtless partisans has ever been able to out-shout Louisiana State football fans or stomp loud enough in a stadium to register a seismic reading in the Geology department (LSU vs. Auburn, 1988, “The Night the Tigers Moved the Earth”).

No other school solved the politics of a “dormitory or football stadium” funding argument by building the dormitories in the stadium.

No program in the country has wanted to win more than LSU.

Yet, for all of the pigskin passion, it is not difficult to divide LSU football history into two defining eras: “that one” and “this one.”

Almost incredibly, given the school’s resolve and “want-to,” it has been 45 years since LSU claimed its first, and only, wire service national championship.

That 11-0 squad was set to song by Coach Paul Dietzel, everybody’s All-American halfback, Billy Cannon, and a platoon defense known affectionately then, albeit insensitively now, as “the Chinese Bandits.”

Now, having rekindled the old “Geaux Tigers” spirit, LSU seeks at least a share of a second title when the school plays Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl on Sunday.

Forget Sunday for now.

If you could make one day in Baton Rouge a holiday, it would be Oct. 31.

It was on Halloween years ago that Cannon made his swivel-hipped run for the ages, an 89-yard punt return to defeat Mississippi, 7-3.

Play-by-play announcer J.C. Politz’s call of Cannon’s run is required study for Louisiana kids -- “Billy Cannon watches it bounce, he takes it on his own 11, he comes back up field to the 15, stumbles momentarily, he’s at the 20, running hard at the 25!! ... “-- while the audio recording has transcended the technological advances of hi-fidelity, reel-to-reel, cassette and is now available on compact disc.

Halloween also was the day, in 1951, that current LSU Coach Nick Saban was born in Fairmont, W.Va.

Cannon and Saban -- two hallowed LSU linchpins connected by All Hallows Eve, yet men with disparate backgrounds.

Cannon, a local kid, oozed Southern from his pores and was the kind of legend they wrote ballads about -- it didn’t hurt that he weighed 210 pounds and ran 100 yards in 9.5 seconds.

Good ol’ boy? The Heisman Trophy he won is displayed in his favorite barbecue joint in Baton Rouge.

That Cannon, who has led an uneven life -- he spent nearly three years in jail in the 1980s on counterfeiting charges -- and has avoided most interviews only adds to his ghostly myth.

Saban?

Not even the tarot-card readers could have seen this walleye-out-of-water coming when he meandered down from Michigan State.

In four years, with his bean-counter organizational skills and nary a hint of humor, Saban has restored LSU to the front porch of frenzy, so much so that the 75-mile drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans may be remembered as the world’s longest clogged artery.

Oh, and just to be clear on the then-vs.-now facts, Cannon’s heroic punt return in 1959 -- the most famous play in school history -- did not lead LSU to the national title.

The Tigers had won the championship the season before, in 1958.

Cannon’s famous jaunt only foreshadowed disappointment. A week later, LSU’s national-title repeat hopes were dashed with a heartbreaking 14-13 loss at Tennessee.

“I haven’t much liked Knoxville since,” Dietzel, now 79, recalled recently of the bitter defeat.

Still, the 1958 title team and Cannon’s run have sort of merged into the same time capsule, and you could bet Tiger fans thought there would many glory days ahead.

There have been few ... until now.

This year’s title run has infused today’s Tiger fans and heightened the lock-box memories of 1958.

Not long ago, Merl Schexnaildre, one of the original “Chinese Bandits,” was introduced at a business function and received a standing and sustained ovation.

Schexnaildre was so touched, he said, “I almost didn’t want to stand.”

Dietzel, only 35 when he coached LSU to the 1958 title, broke Tiger hearts when he left to coach Army in 1962.

Eventually, though, the old Tiger claw took hold of him and, two months ago, he and his wife Ann moved back to Baton Rouge.

He picked the right year for it too, although there was no way Dietzel could have known he was coming back in a big way the same year LSU football was.

The return itself did not rekindle memories as much as, Dietzel says, “the memories were brought back to me.”

Embracing this link, Saban has more than once invited Dietzel to speak to the team.

Some LSU players don’t have parents old enough to remember the 1958 team. Chad Lavalais, the Tigers’ star defensive tackle, recently was asked whether this year’s defense would have ever considered “Chinese Bandits” as a nickname. “Next question,” he joked.

Yet, no question, the gap between 1958 and this season has been bridged, on corners and in coffee shops, over plates of jambalaya.

The 1958 team was more than just a good team -- it was transcendent.

The Tigers that year introduced platoons that would go down in local lore as “White Team,” “Go Team” and “the Chinese Bandits.”

In a college football era when the best 11 players often played both ways, LSU innovatively maximized its 34-player traveling roster.

Dietzel didn’t concoct this formula with posterity in mind; he did it to save his job.

His Tigers were coming off a 5-5 season in 1957 and Dietzel figured he was running out of political capital.

“People were figuring out a way to ship this greenhorn back to West Point,” said Dietzel, who previously had coached under Red Blaik at Army.

During a 1957 loss at Mississippi, in which the Rebels wore down his lighter squad, Dietzel had his epiphany.

He recalls his team was so tuckered out against Ole Miss, he thought, “I’d have to squeegee players off the deck to get them out for the second half.”

The next spring he unveiled his platoon system.

The top 11 players, who included stars Cannon, halfback Johnny Robinson and quarterback Warren Rabb, became members of the “White Team.”

They started the game and played offense and defense.

Dietzel then divided his remaining players into separate groups of offensive and defensive players. The offensive subs were “the Gold Team,” later shortened to “Go,” and the defensive scrubs became “the Chinese Bandits.”

To keep his starters fresh, Dietzel would deploy 11-man relief squads for the starters, usually once during each quarter.

Schexnaildre, a marginal athlete who might have otherwise collected bench splinters, became, at 175 pounds, the middle linebacker for “the Bandits.”

It was just about the greatest thing that could have happened.

“It’s difficult to express how exciting it was,” Schexnaildre recalls today. “I mean, you were going to play. That’s why you went to school. That’s where the adrenaline comes, the excitement comes. We were 19-year-olds, weren’t we?”

Schexnaildre remembers, in the second game of 1958, the “Bandits” coming to the rescue to preserve a 13-3 win at Bear Bryant’s Alabama.

He remembers Dietzel’s mentioning his backup defensive unit in the postgame news conference and that moment’s becoming the birth of a mania.

“It carried over the next week,” Schexnaildre said. “Goodness gracious, by midseason, it was crazy.”

Prompted by the public address announcer, “the Bandits” raced onto the field to a rapturous roar.

A local band recorded a single celebrating the exploits of LSU’s hit squad.

The players were mostly home-grown, with names that sounded like wine regions: Bergeron, Bourgeois, Bourque and Fournet.

“The Bandits” were inspired by one of Dietzel’s favorite comic strips, “Terry and the Pirates,” by Milt Caniff.

The 1958 LSU defense recorded four shutouts and allowed opponents only 53 points.

“The Bandits were not big and they were slow,” Dietzel said. “But their speed was such that they all got there about the same time.”

Schexnaildre thinks the notice received by “the Bandits” inspired the first-string defense.

“We were getting so much coverage and attention,” he said. “I think it did make them measurably better.”

The 1958 team capped an 11-0 season with a 7-0 victory over Clemson in the Sugar Bowl.

In those days, the Associated Press crowned its No. 1 team before the game, so the Tigers were already champions when they rolled into New Orleans.

Schexnaildre said that put more, not less, pressure on LSU.

“To have lost would have been a disgrace,” he said of the Sugar Bowl. “How can you be national champions and lose?”

*

The high times might have lasted years for LSU and its young coach, whose bright smile earned him the nickname “Pepsodent Paul.”

LSU finished third in the polls in 1959 and fourth in 1961, after which Dietzel succumbed to the calling of an old love, Army, the place where he and a young coach named Vince Lombardi had once mentored under the legendary Blaik.

Dietzel’s West Point career never matched his LSU heights.

He went 21-18-1 in four years at Army.

“He ran into two things, Vietnam and [Navy quarterback] Roger Staubach,” longtime New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Peter Finney, who covered the 1958 LSU team, recently quipped about Dietzel’s Army problems.

After leaving Army, Dietzel coached nine seasons at South Carolina. He became an administrator, moved to the mountains, took up skiing, yet eventually found his way back to Baton Rouge, as if pulled by an unexplainable force.

Regrets for leaving LSU too soon?

“I have never looked back,” he said.

Looking forward now, Dietzel says he can’t wait to watch LSU play Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. He also has been swept up by that “Geaux Tigers” euphoria.

“Nick Saban has done a fantastic job,” Dietzel said. “He’s a real dedicated, no-frills kind of a coach. He doesn’t miss anything. He kind of has the same feeling I have. I might not be as smart, but I know one thing, I can work harder than most.

“My personal feeling, which is worth exactly what you’re paying me for it, is there’s not a better team in America right now.”

People always want Dietzel to compare his 1958 team to this one; he says it’s useless.

“If anyone would have come out with four wideouts on us, we’d have called a timeout and said, ‘What, are you out of your minds?’ ” he said. “The game has changed. The size has changed. You’re talking an entirely different era. How would Rocky Marciano do against Mike Tyson? You can’t compare one era with another.”

Of course, there are exceptions.

Asked whether Billy Cannon could have starred on today’s LSU team, Dietzel did not hesitate.

“Some athletes could make any team then,” he said, “... or any team now.”